His production of Ben Jonson's The Devil Is an Ass applied the knife to yards of text, and his West Yorkshire Playhouse production of the children's classic Peter Pan was so dark and grim that one set of parents threatened to sue on the grounds that their child had been traumatised.
It is intended to recall the grim statement by Sir Edward Grey, then foreign secretary, in August 1914: "The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime".
Conditions at the Scuola Verde first aid centre, Augusta's only emergency shelter for migrant children, are increasingly grim, with overcrowded dormitories and rubbish-strewn hallways.
If Jimmy Grimble is about the grim realities of childhood, it is also about the stories we tell ourselves that allow us to escape.
For those without faith or such purpose, said Allen, there is no good answer to life's grim reality, despite the best efforts of philosophers to find one.
My God, this was a bit of a grim year, wasn't it?
On his laptop, a grim parade of images flicks past.
I pictured Baghdad as Black Hawk Down's Mogadishu, all claustrophobic and high-contrast gun battles with desperate men in dark alleys, and mostly I heard Ride of the Valkyries, that grim killing opus in Apocalypse Now, retrofitted for our urban assaults and nighttime raids.
Again, my first instinct is that they must have been rubbernecking, the sordid allegations having made HRH a rather grim sort of draw, or at the very least not as ferociously dull and pointless as the rest of the apres-ski programme.
The FA will live up to that responsibility.' The FA customarily takes a grim view of players and managers assaulting fans.
The grim death toll in the Mediterranean has provoked a chorus of calls for action to prevent 2015 becoming the deadliest year for migrants trying to get to Europe.
